This time he picked up. “… Hello?”
“I—” She stopped, took deep breaths, tried to be calm. “It’s Lucia.” She sensed hesitation. “You remember—”
“The girl in the Pantheon. Oh, shoot.” He used the English word. “We were going to meet, weren’t we?”
“Yes. At the baths.”
“Was it yesterday? I’m sorry—”
“No,” she said, forcing herself to keep an even tone. “Not yesterday. Two days ago.”
“You turned up and I didn’t. Look, I’m really sorry. That’s me all over.” His voice sounded calm, faraway, untroubled save for a little embarrassment. A voice from another world, she thought. “Let me make it up to you. I’ll buy you lunch. Tomorrow?”
“No,” she snapped.
“No?”
“It doesn’t matter about lunch … Let’s just meet,” she said.
“Okay. Whatever you want. I owe you. I don’t want you to think badly of me. Where, at the baths?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Today,” she gasped. “It has to be today.”
Again she heard him hesitate, and she cursed herself for her lack of control.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I have a study break this afternoon. I can get away. I’ll see you there. What, about three?”
“That will be fine.”
“Okay. Ciao … ”
She put away the phone. Her heart was hammering, her breath short.
* * *
She made an excuse and got out of the office. She changed into a shapeless patterned smock, loosely tied by a belt at the waist.
She caught a taxi back to the baths.
This time she walked around the complex until she came to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In the sixteenth century this had been built into the ruins of the baths, to designs by Michelangelo. The church’s name proudly adorned one of those broken-open domes.
Inside, the church was bright, spacious, and open, nearly a hundred yards across, richly decorated. There was an elaborate sundial inscribed on the floor, a great bronze gash that cut across one nave. She followed it to a complex design at its termination, where a spot of sunlight would map the solstices of years far into her own future. Here and there she made out relics of the building’s origin, like seashell motifs on the walls. Michelangelo and the architects had used this great vaulting space well, but once this had been nothing more than the tepidarium of the tremendous complex of the baths.
She had chosen this place for Daniel’s sake. She had been nervous about how he would react to her, especially in her changed condition. She thought the baths would pique his interest in the deep history of Rome, and how its buildings had been used and reused. Maybe he would come for the buildings, if not for her.
“… Lucia.”
She turned, and there he was. He wore what looked like the same faded jeans, a T-shirt labeled ROSWELL U RUNNING TEAM, and he clutched a baseball cap in his hand. The light behind him caught the unruly hair around his face, making it glow red.
He grinned. “You’ve changed. You’re still beautiful, of course. What’s different? …”
At the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the tears seemed to explode from her, fueled by longing, unhappiness, grief. She dropped her head and covered her face with her hands. How she would have reacted if he had come to her and taken her in his arms, she didn’t know.
But he didn’t. When she was able to look up, she saw that he had actually backed away a couple of steps. He was holding his baseball cap up before him, like a shield to fend her off, and his mouth was round with shock. “Hey,” he said uncertainly. He laughed, but it was a brittle sound. “Take it easy. People are staring.”
She struggled to get herself under control. Her face felt like a soggy mass. “Well, fuck them. Even if it is a church.”
He was staring at her, eyes wide, mouth still agape.
She said, “Let’s sit down.”
“Okay. Okay. Sitting down is good—”
She grabbed his hand to stop him talking. She marched him to a pew in the nave where the sundial glistened on the marble floor.
They sat side by side, far from anybody else. He wasn’t looking at her, she realized; his gaze wandered around the paintings on the wall, the marble floor. At last he said, “Look, if you’re in some kind of trouble—”
She hissed, “Why didn’t you turn up?”
“What?”
“Here, at the baths. On Tuesday. You didn’t come.”
“Hey,” he said defensively. “So what? It wasn’t important. It was just—” He leaned forward, so he was facing away from her. “Look. You have to be realistic. I’m seventeen years old. You’re a pretty kid. And, well, that’s pretty much it.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “I saw you in the Pantheon, and I spotted you in the park that day, and I thought, what the hell, and I said I’d meet you in the Piazza Navona, and there you were, and then—”
“And then?”
“And then you told me you were fifteen.” He shrugged. “It was just a few moments, months and months ago. It wasn’t even a date.”
“It was important to me.”
“Well, I’m sorry. How could I know?”
“Because you met me. We talked.”
“Only for a few minutes.”
But in that time, she thought, we made a connection. Or did we? She looked at him again, in his nerdish T-shirt, with his baseball cap on the wooden seat beside him. He was so young himself, she realized. He was just playing at relationships, playing at flirting. That was all he had been doing, all the time; even his supposed seriousness was just part of the game. Hope started to die.
He said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Really. And anyhow, I did like you, you know.”
She sighed. “Look, I don’t blame you. The irony of it is, with almost anybody you met it would have made no difference.”
“But it does with you.” He turned around and looked back at her. In the church’s soft light his skin seemed very smooth, very young. “Look, I was, am, and always will be an asshole. And I’m sorry.” His face clouded. “I remember now. You said something about problems at home. Your family? If there’s something serious, maybe my dad can help—”
“I’ve had a baby,” she said simply.
That took him aback. His mouth opened and closed. Then he nodded. “Okay. A baby. When? How old were you? Fourteen, thirteen—”
“It was two months ago.”
He laughed, but his face quickly drained of humor. “That’s ridiculous. Impossible, in fact.” He frowned,
trying to remember. “You sure didn’t look pregnant when I last saw you.”
“That’s because I wasn’t. I was a virgin,” she said. “I became pregnant in March.”
That, absurdly, made him blush; he briefly looked away. “So,” he whispered, “you had sex with some guy. You got pregnant. Then, what, you had a miscarriage—”
“I had a baby,” she said rapidly. “A live, full-term baby, after thirteen weeks. I don’t care whether you think that’s impossible or not. It happened.”
He sat silently for a moment, mouth gaping. Then he shook his head. “Okay. Suppose I concede you had a baby, six months premature, as if … Who’s the father?”
“His name is Giuliano … I have forgotten the rest.”
“You’ve forgotten his name? Did you know him?”
“No. Not really.”
He hesitated. “Was it rape?”
“No. It’s complicated.”
“You’re telling me.”
“It’s a family matter. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot I don’t want to know … This guy who knocked you up. Was he older than you?”
“Oh, yes. About thirty, I think.”
“Is that legal here? … Oh. He wasn’t a family member, was he?”
“No. Well, a distant cousin.”
“Murkie
r and murkier. Did your parents set you up somehow? Did they sell you?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. I can’t explain it. And you probably wouldn’t believe me anyhow.”
He gazed back at her, exasperated.
She studied him, trying to understand his mood. He wasn’t scared anymore — or at least that wasn’t his only emotion. He was genuinely listening, genuinely trying to understand, and his face showed a kind of determination.
He was constructing a new model of their relationship in his head, she thought. First he had believed he was a kind of romantic hero, the traveler in Rome. Then when he found out she was too young for a relationship, he decided he was playing a flirting, slightly edgy game with a precocious kid. Her news that she had given birth, and in a manner he couldn’t understand, had broken all that apart. But now he was trying to construct a new vision. Now he was the knight who could ride in to save her, solve all her problems at a single blow — or anyhow a single phone call to his father.
He really was just a kid, Lucia thought almost fondly, and he saw the world in simplified, childlike ways. What he imagined was going on here had very little to do with the truth. But, kid or not, he was all she had. And, she thought coldly, if she had to use him to ensure her own survival, she would.
Lucia forced a smile. “You are an American,” she said. “You made deserts bloom. You put people on the moon. Surely you can help me—”
But he was staring past her.
Pina was standing silently at the end of the pew.
* * *
Daniel stood up and confronted Pina. “Oh, it’s you. The ugly sister.”
“This is a church,” Pina said levelly. “Let’s not make a scene.” She turned to Lucia. “Rosa is waiting outside, with a car.”
Daniel said, a little wildly, “Are you going to drag her out of here, the way you dragged her out of that coffee shop?” He was guessing, Lucia saw, but he was hitting the mark.
Pina glared at him, calculating. Then she said, “I’ll sit down if you will.”
Daniel hesitated, then nodded curtly. They both sat.
Pina touched Lucia’s arm, but Lucia flinched away. “Oh, Lucia. What are we going to do with you?”
“How did you find me this time?”
“This boy can’t do anything for—”
“How did you find me?”
“There’s a tracer chip in your cell phone. It wasn’t hard.”
Lucia glared at her. “You bugged me?”
“For your own good.” Lucia still wouldn’t let Pina touch her, but she leaned forward, and Lucia could smell a milky Crypt scent on her clothes. “Come home, sister.”
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Daniel said. “But she isn’t going anywhere, except with me.”
Pina laughed, softly, but in his face. “I believe sex with minors is known as statutory rape in your country. Do you want to find out about the Italian equivalent?”
It was an obvious ploy, but it made him hesitate. “I haven’t touched her.”
“Do you think that will matter?”
Lucia said, “Daniel, she won’t go to the police.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s not the way the Order does things.” She took a deep breath. “And besides, she would have to explain to them how come I’m pregnant.”
Daniel was puzzled. “You mean you were pregnant.”
“… No. I am pregnant. Again.”
There, she thought. I’ve said it.
Pina’s mouth tightened. “What have you told him, Lucia?”
Daniel was staring at her, a mix of horror and incredulity on his face. “Was it him again? This guy Giuliano?”
“No. Or rather …”
Lucia remembered her bafflement when her menstruation had stopped, her growing puzzlement at the strange sensations in her belly — strange, yet familiar. She had gone to Patrizia innocently, wondering if she was suffering some kind of postnatal symptom.
She hadn’t been able to believe what Patrizia had told her. But Patrizia seemed to have expected it. Patrizia called in others — Rosa, one of the younger matres, assistants from the delivery rooms and the crиches. They had clustered around Lucia, their smiles glistening wetly, touching her shoulders and back, kissing her brow and cheeks and lips, overwhelming her with their scent and taste of sweetness and milk. “It’s a miracle,” one of them had whispered in Lucia’s ear. “A miracle …”
“A miracle,” Lucia said hotly to a baffled Daniel. “That’s what they called it. A miracle. But it isn’t really, is it, Pina? Because in the Crypt it happens every week, two or three or four times.”
Daniel asked, “What miracle?”
“I hadn’t had sex,” Lucia said. “Not since the birth. Not since Giuliano — and then, only that once, before my first pregnancy. I hadn’t had sex, but I’m pregnant anyway. And it’s Giuliano’s baby again, isn’t it, Pina? Conception without sex,” she said bitterly. “Have you ever heard of such a thing, Daniel? Do they have such things in America? No, of course not. There are wonders happening in that Crypt to be found nowhere else in the world, I’m sure. Wonders in my own body.” She turned on Pina. “But it isn’t my body anymore. Is it, Pina? My body, my womb and loins, belong to the Order. My future is babies — more and more of them. My body is just a tool to be used as efficiently as possible for the Order’s purposes. And I, I don’t count for anything — my wants, my needs, my desires—”
“You never did,” said Pina gently.
Daniel was staring at one, then the other, obviously baffled, scared. “I don’t have idea one about what’s going on here. But, hey, Grizelda, if you think I’m going to stand by—”
“Lucia!” The voice was high, evoking echoes from the high marble walls. Rosa was walking across the great marble floor toward them. She wore a business suit; she looked powerful, competent, unstoppable. She would be here in seconds.
“Hide me,” Lucia said to Daniel.
“What?”
She stood. “Hide me now, or walk away.”
Rosa broke into a run. Pina reached up to hold Lucia.
Lucia said, “Pina, please—”
Pina hesitated, for a second. Then she dropped her hands, a look of utter dismay on her face.
Daniel used that second to grab Lucia’s hand. They ran together, out of the nave and across the floor. Daniel dragged her into a knot of visitors led by a woman who held an umbrella up in the air. They worked their way through the tightly packed group, toward the door.
When they had made it out into the open air, Rosa and Pina were nowhere to be seen.
They stared at each other — laughed, briefly hysterical — then fell silent. Lucia touched his cheek; it was hot. “Well, Daniel — now what?”
Brica came to her.
Chapter 36
She stood over her mother, sullen, worn out, her face slack. There was little left of the bright, beautiful girl who had sat in the forest with the children and told them stories of the sidhe, and Regina’s heart broke a little more.
But she said huskily, “Have you forgiven me yet for saving your life?”
“When you die I will be free,” Brica said. “But it is too late for me. You should have let me go, Mother.” It was a reprise of a conversation they had had many times since their days in Londinium, and the incident of the fat negotiatore.
“Your problem was you kept falling in love. But in these times there is no room for love.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“No, I suppose not. No more than I could help loving you.”
Brica eventually went away. There would be no farewells, no final forgiveness. Regina knew that did not matter.
* * *
Sometimes Regina wondered if she really was mad, as Brica had sometimes accused her, if she was an unnatural mother. Yes, Brica was family. Yes, in normal times a mother must protect her children. Yes, she should release them to live their own lives when they come of
age.
But Regina had not lived through normal times.
When Regina was born, Roman civilization was intact. It dominated the Mediterranean and much of Europe, just as it had for five hundred years. Britain, though rebellious and troubled, was still embedded in the imperial system, its economy and society and aspirations and vision of its future fashioned by Roman culture and values. Now, as the light faded for Regina, the Empire in the west had disappeared and its possessions were in the hands of barbarians.
In her lifetime of turmoil and destruction, as the Saxons had burned across Britain like a forest fire, as even Rome itself crumbled and shuddered, Regina had come to see her family — not as something to release to freedom — but as something to preserve : a burden that had to be saved. Even if it meant burying it in a hole in the ground. It was as if she had not allowed Brica to be born at all, but had kept her in the safety of her own womb, a dark thing, bloody, resentful — but safe.
* * *
In the last days the women were distracted. They talked excitedly about a new light in the sky, like a burning boat that sailed the great river of stars, and what such a remarkable omen might portend.
But Regina felt no apprehension. Perhaps it was the fire ship that had lit up her childhood, returned to warm her now that she was growing cold.
And then there was no more talk. The lights seemed to dim, one by one, in the corridors of her thinking.
But then she thought she heard someone calling her.
She ran through passageways. She was light and small, laughing, free of the thing in her belly. She ran until she found her mother, who sat in her chamber with a silver mirror held before her face, while Cartumandua braided her golden hair. When she heard Regina coming, Julia turned and smiled.
* * *
In that same year — the year 476 after Christ, the year of Regina’s death — the boy-Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by the German warrior Odoacer. There wasn’t even a nominal attempt to find a replacement. At last the system of the emperors broke down. Odoacer proclaimed himself king of Italy.
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